The Headlines

ON THE PENINSULA. In recent years, galleries from the United States and Europe, like Gladstone and König, have been opening outposts in Seoul, hoping to tap into South Korea’s burgeoning art market. Now, Melanie Gerlis reports in her weekly Financial Times column, White Cube is joining them. It plans to open a location in the city’s Gangnam district this fall. The London-based firm is apparently in expansion mode, as it also plans to open a New York branch in the fall. Peres Projects recently inaugurated a grand new gallery in the South Korean capital, and rumors persist about other dealers that might soon take the plunge. Gerlis also reports that Thaddaeus Ropac, which has had a Seoul venue since 2021, is taking on more space.

THE DIRECTOR’S CHAIR. Almost exactly a year after the National Gallery of Canada’s previous leader, Sasha Suda, announced that she was decamping to run the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Ottawa institution has a new director and CEO: Jean-François Bélisle. He is currently the director and chief curator of the Musée d’art de Joliette in Quebec. The national museum has faced criticism of late, following the dismissal of four senior staffers amid an effort to reach a more diverse audience, as the Global and Mail reports. “I believe that art can change society, and look forward to collaborating with the gallery’s staff, as well as artists from across the country, to ensure our institution continues to be a fantastic force for good,” Bélisle said in a statement.

The Digest

Artist Sterling Wells has created a modestly size barge that is now floating in Los Angeles’s Ballona Creek. Wells is planning to paint aboard the craft for the next month, and will open a solo show at Night Gallery in the city on July 8. [Fox 11 Los Angeles]

The billionaire former New York mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has given $130 million to the under-construction Perelman Performing Arts Center (more than its namesake, art-collecting businessman Ronald O. Perelman, donated). Bloomberg’s totals to the multifarious Shed also now total $130 million. [The New York Times]

As dangerous wildfire smoke gripped parts of North America on Wednesday, some galleries closed their doors or canceled openings and other events. Among them was Pace, which shut down in the middle of the day due to the air quality. [Pace Gallery/Instagram]

Lehmann Maupin global comms director Sarah Levine and photographer William Jess Laird were married in beautiful Marfa, Texas, with Levine wearing a Vera Wang dress inspired by the work of artist and noted Marfa resident Donald Judd. [Vogue]

New York City filed suit against architect Steven Holl and his namesake firm, arguing that their acclaimed design for a Queens library does not meet the requirements of the Americans With Disabilities Act. A company spox noted that the city approved the project and said, “Accessibility is a core value of our work.” [The New York Times]

Archaeologists excavating a former temple complex on the Greek island of Kythnos found more than 2,000 clay figures, apparently left there to worship the goddess of agriculture, Demeter. The area is believed to have been inhabited from the 12th century B.C.E. to the 7th century C.E. [The Associated Press]

The Kicker

THE MAJOR LEAGUES. The artist Rick Lowe just opened two exhibitions of his scintillating paintings in Athens, at the Benaki Museum and Gagosian. When T: The New York Times Style Magazinecaught up with Lowe in advance of those shows, he said that he was working as many as 16 hours a day, but he seemed to be enjoying himself. “You know, I feel like this moment right now for me, getting ready for these shows in Athens, this is like my N.B.A. playoffs,” he told the magazine. “There’s no stopping. As Kobe [Bryant] once said, ‘You rest at the end.’ ” Do what you’ll love, as they say, and you’ll never work another day in your life. [T]

The Headlines

JUMPING ACROSS THE POND. London’s Stephen Friedman Gallery, which reps artists like Yinka Shonibare, Pam Glick, and Deborah Roberts, is opening a branch in the gallery-rich Manhattan neighborhood of Tribeca, Melanie Gerlis reports in her Financial Times column. The 5,000-square-foot space is at 54 Franklin, the former address of the Postmasters gallery, which moved to a nomadic model last year. (That is in the 10013 ZIP code, the priciest in the city for residential real estate, the Wall Street Journal just noted.) The new location is slated to open later this year.

POLICE BLOTTER. The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa said that it is in the process of recovering from a ransomware attack that occurred last month, the Ottawa Citizen reports. It said that, while it had lost some operational data, all of its payment systems had remained secure. “We have taken this incident very seriously,” the museum’s interim director, Angela Cassie, told the outlet. Meanwhile, down in Michigan, there was a break-in at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit in the early hours of Tuesday, the Metro Times reports. No art was taken, but a police official said that money may have been taken from a cash register.

The Digest

Many U.K. arts groups are facing funding issues as they try to bounce back from the pandemic and as government entities decrease funding. Not helping matters: Attendance was down sharply at many institutions in 2022 versus 2019: 34 percent at the British Museum, and 55 percent art the National Gallery. [Bloomberg]

Officials reportedly shuttered a show in Shenzhen, China, for displaying a piece by artist Lí Wei that includes the sentence, “We are the last generation.” That phrase became a meme amid Covid restrictions in China, after a man was captured on video saying it as he resisted efforts to move him to a quarantine facility. [ArtAsiaPacific]

Some major lots in a sale of the late collector Heidi Horten’s jewelry sold below their estimates at Christie’s, but the auction still made $156 million, above its $139 million low estimate. Jewish groups had criticized the event because her husband, Helmut Horten, acquired Jewish firms sold under duress in Nazi Germany. [The Associated Press]

Architect Norman Foster just opened an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. “Buildings last as long as they’re useful,” he said in a (quite zesty) interview with writer Farah Nayeri that covered climate change and other hot-button issues. ”The history of architecture, like cities, is a history of renewal. [The New York Times]

Sotheby’s is selling a rare “Pink on Pink” Patek Philippe 1518—one of only 15 known to exist—next month with a top estimate of $4.5 million. Like the art market, the watch business may be slowing; one dealer said that “people are a little less willing to write seven figure checks compared to 15 months ago.” [Bloomberg]

Artist Ei Arakawa‘s latest show, at the Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg in Switzerland, looks at life for artists who are parents. “There is a sense that the infrastructure is changing and that museums are (hopefully) changing their attitudes toward artist-parents,” he said. [Spike]

The Kicker

A REAL DEAL? On a recent episode of the British television program The Greatest Auction, a dealer specializing in Banksy shelled out £250,000 (about $314,000) for a small artwork attributed to that pseudonymous artist. The Guardian reports that another street artist who goes by the name Silent Billhas come forward to say that he actually created the piece, which shows a rat alongside the words “NEVER LIKED THIS BANKSY.” Not an ideal situation! Silent Bill told the paper, “I think the seller should donate the money to worthwhile charities and the buyer should re-evaluate their art portfolio. P.S. I have a nice Warhol I did for sale.” [The Guardian]

Outside consultant Tania Lafrenière is currently juggling the two leadership positions, being paid as much as $306,150 annually under interim director Angela Cassie, while also maintaining her own consultancy firm.

By comparison, the last chief executive of the gallery, Sasha Suda, was hired at a salary range up to $210,800 in 2019. A job listing for a replacement chief executive and direction position was posted last fall with a salary range of $204,200 to $240,200. The salary range for the human resources director is $105,000–$149,000 and the range for the chief operating officer is $149,000–$212,000. The news was first reported by the Globe and Mail.

Suda brought in Lafrenière as vice president of people, culture and belonging in January 2021 with an internal announcement that did not note it was a contract consulting position. Under Lafrenière’s management of the HR department, there were four major layoffs of senior positions in the fall that have made the future of the museum uncertain. These included chief curator Kitty Scott and Greg Hill, whose position as chair and senior curator of Indigenous art had been deemed surplus. Hill had worked at the national museum for 22 years and staged two major surveys of Indigenous contemporary art.

The other two layoffs were head of conservation Stephen Gritt and communications director Denise Siele. A memo from Cassie said a restructuring was the reason for the departures, but Hill said he was let go for a much clearer reason.

“I want to put this out there before it is spun into meaningless platitudes,” he wrote on Instagram. “The truth is, I’m being fired because I don’t agree with and am deeply disturbed by the colonial and anti-Indigenous ways the Department of Indigenous Ways and Decolonization is being run.”

Prior to Lafrenière being named the museum’s vice president of people, culture and belonging in January 2021, she signed a consulting contract in October 2020 to provide 88 days of work for $96,800. Consultants are often hired for short-term projects and $1,100 per day is considered a modest fee by experts. However, Lafrenière’s contracts were extended for several months. The contract signed last March was for a two-year period and included the COO responsibilities after the retirement of David Loye in August 2021.

The news of Lafrenière’s compensation comes less than eight months after it was announced Suda would leave her position as chief executive at the National Gallery of Canada to become director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She was only three years into a five-year-term, and was in the middle of launching an ambitious strategic plan for the museum. It included commitments to Indigenous knowledge, better community connections, exhibits like the international survey of Indigenous contemporary art “Àbadakone,” but also a stream of staff leaving.

The National Gallery of Canada operates at arm’s length from the Canadian government, but receives annual federal funding and is a member of the Department of Canadian Heritage. Its financial statements are also government documents subject to access to information requests.

There is ongoing concern from members of the Canadian art community that the gallery’s annual funding could be negatively affected by the November layoffs and the uncertainty regarding its current operations. In December, the Canadian Minister of Heritage Pablo Rodriguez wrote to the National Gallery’s board to express his “deep concern” over the departures of the four senior staff.

Lafrenière did not respond to a request for comment. On Friday, National Gallery of Canada spokesperson Douglas Chow defended Lafrenière’s compensation, totaling $512,762 in consulting fees since 2020–21, in a written statement to ARTnews. Chow called her “a transitional leader with a particular skillset” required to help the museum with “necessary changes as part of a major HR transformation.”

“Her fees are in line with the scope and breadth of the significant HR transformation at the Gallery, and with market rates for services of this calibre,” Chow wrote.

Chow cited the signing of a four-year collective agreement with the Public Service Alliance of Canada, a decrease in the number of union grievances, and the recruitment of 118 new hires. While the search for a full-time HR director is taking place, Chow noted that Lafrenière “will be part of the process of recruiting and mentoring successful candidates to ensure a successful onboarding and transition.”

If you have tips or additional information about the current situation at the National Gallery of Canada, you can email the author of this article at kho@artnews.com. She is also on Signal and Whatsapp.

The Headlines

CONTROVERSY HITS CANADA. Late last Friday, news broke that the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa let go four senior staff members, a move that “shocked Canada’s art community,” Karen K. Ho writes in ARTnews. Angela Cassie, the interim director and CEO of the museum, said in an internal memo that the cuts were meant to “better align the Gallery’s leadership team with the organization’s new strategic plan.” Some claimed otherwise. Gary A. Hill , the senior curator of Indigenous art and the first-ever Indigenous curator at the museum, wrote on his social media, “The truth is, I’m being fired because I don’t agree with and am deeply disturbed by the colonial and anti-Indigenous ways the Department of Indigenous Ways and Decolonization is being run.” Also laid off were Kitty Scott, chief curator and deputy director; Stephen Gritt, director of conservation and technical research; and Denise Siele, senior manager of communications.

THE CLIMATE PROTESTS CONTINUED this past week in Paris, Oslo, and Milan, where, as Devorah Lauter points out in ARTnews, activists took on works that were not protected by glass. The Milan protest, which involved flour poured over an Andy Warhol art car for BMW, had already grabbed headlines last week, but the other two actions didn’t receive quite as much attention. The Paris one took place at collector François Pinault’s Bourse de Commerce museum, where activists doused an outdoor Charles Ray sculpture in red paint. The French minister of culture, Rima Abdul Malak, was not pleased. And at Oslo’s Vigeland Sculpture Park, protestors also threw orange paint on a 46-foot-tall sculpture, which was not harmed in the process.

The Digest

Just 10 days before its expected sale date, Christie’s pulled a T. rex skeleton from an auction in Hong Kong. The skeleton was expected to fetch between $15 million and $25 million. [The New York Times]

Many works that are on view at art fairs cannot be purchased, and that is because they’ve been bought before these events even open. Brian Ng surveyed the phenomenon and asked gallerists about it. [Artsy]

Trustees at Washington’s Tacoma Art Museum said they would not voluntarily recognize a unionization effort by workers at the institution. Staff at the museum now must vote on whether to unionize. [The Seattle Times]

Jean-Marie Straub, one half of the famed French filmmaking duo Straub-Huillet, whose work has also been seen in art galleries, has died at 89. [Variety]

Maine’s Portland Museum of Art revealed potential designs for the institution’s expansion that were thought about by four finalists for the project. One of those finalists is Adjaye Associates, which is currently at work on the new Studio Museum in Harlem. [The Portland Press Herald]

Artists Ebecho Muslimova, Aria Dean, and Anna Weyant; dealer Alexander Shulan; and critic Dean Kissick are among the figures who Air Mail said are “remaking Lower Manhattan in their own image.” [Air Mail]

The Kicker

BROADCAST NEWS. The latest news venture is mainly the product of artists, not journalists, and it’s being run from New York’s Brooklyn Museum, not a traditional sound studio. It’s the product of For Freedoms, which was founded as an artist-run super PAC and continues to stage politically oriented events and shows. “There has to be space for play in order for us to be creative, to rethink some of these big things,” its cofounder, Eric Gottesman, told the New Yorker. “If we really are going to profoundly shift the foundations of the structures of society through culture, it’s got to be playing with it, poking at it, experimenting with it, failing, and laughing.” [The New Yorker]

The news comes less than six months after the departure of Sasha Suda, who left her role as the institution’s chief operating officer and director in July to become the director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in September.

A memo from interim director and CEO Angela Cassie said a restructuring was the reason for the departures of NGC deputy director and chief curator Kitty Scott; director of conservation and technical research Stephen Gritt; senior manager of communications Denise Siele; as well as Greg A. Hill, Audain senior curator of Indigenous Art.

“The workforce changes are the result of numerous factors and were made to better align the Gallery’s leadership team with the organization’s new strategic plan,” Cassie wrote. “For privacy reasons, the Gallery is not at liberty to discuss details regarding these departures.”

Hill, who worked at the NGC for 22 years and was the museum’s first Indigenous curator, said he was immediately let go for much clearer reasons. “I want to put this out there before it is spun into meaningless platitudes,” he wrote on Instagram on Thursday. “The truth is, I’m being fired because I don’t agree with and am deeply disturbed by the colonial and anti-Indigenous ways the Department of Indigenous Ways and Decolonization is being run.”

In 2013, Hill co-curated the groundbreaking survey exhibition “Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art,” with associate curator of Indigenous Art Christine Lalonde and guest curator Candice Hopkins, who won the Independent Curator International Leo Award last year. That exhibition brought together the work of more than 80 contemporary Indigenous artists from the world and was among the first in Canada to be opened with a land acknowledgement. In 2018, Hill was also an Indspire Award winner for the Arts.

Vancouver art collector and philanthropist Michael Audain, who had endowed the Indigenous curatorial job since 2007, told the Globe and Mail in an email that the firing of Hill was “a great surprise.”

He continued, “I was under the impression that Greg had done a creditable job of introducing Indigenous art into the gallery, something which was sadly missing when former director Pierre Théberge originally asked me to endow Greg’s position.”

Scott has more than 27 years of experience in major art museums like the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and the Serpentine Galleries in London. She also acquired one of Louise Bourgeois’s iconic spider sculptures that now sits at the front of the National Gallery of Canada’s entrance.

The National Gallery of Canada and its former staffers did not immediately respond to ARTnews’s requests for further comment.

In a first, the National Gallery of Canada is acknowledging the group (don’t call them a “collective,” Bronson, the only surviving member, said) with a massive survey of their work from its very beginnings. After its run in Ottawa, the show is set to head to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

What started as an experiment grew into a powerful force in the Canadian contemporary art milieu. Up to that point, no one talked much about non-normative sexual and gender identity. General Idea wanted to talk—and so they did, starting a conversation that might not otherwise have happened in polite, middle-class society.

Based on the show, it’s clear that there wasn’t a plan for the group from the get-go. The three artists were living in a commune in Toronto with other creative types who departed one by one, leaving Bronson, Partz, and Zontal behind.

“We modeled ourselves after a rock band,” said Bronson in an interview from his home in Berlin. As one of the didactic panels at the entrance to the show declares: “We wanted to be famous, glamorous, and rich … we were and we are.”

Among the works on display are paintings, drawings, installations, multiples, sculptures, texts, photographs, test tubes, video, balloons, and myriad pieces of ephemera. Much of it was from others working on the edge of the outré creative movement, much of it was—and still is—provocative (butt plugs, bondage, creations that put feminism to the test). Lest one think this sounds incohesive, it is not: General Idea may not have had a plan, but they commandeered concepts from, among others, media scholar Marshall McLuhan and writer William S. Burroughs, blatantly repurposing them into an eloquent narrative of the times.

In 1972, General Idea started a publication that riffed off LIFE Magazine, a stalwart of the publishing industry that was read by millions. General Idea’s version, FILE, was loaded with stolen content (numerous examples are on display in the show). In one edition, said Bronson, excerpts from Roland Barthes’s 1957 book Mythologies were incorporated, word for word. People would pick it up from the newsstand thinking it was LIFE, which was part of the artistic intent.

Other pieces continued this kind of artistic theft. An installation that doubled as a bona fide retail boutique toyed with Marcel Duchamp’s 1936 work Coeurs Volants. An iconic landscape painting by Canadian artist Tom Thomson was used as a background for a piece referencing HIV treatment.

“What we were doing,” Bronson said, “was considered to be morally and ethically corrupt.”

General Idea, AIDS, 1987.

Canada may not have been ready for Bronson and his collaborators, and they considered moving to Europe, but everybody was going to New York where plenty of others were pushing the artistic envelope. In spite of what Lawrence Weiner told them—that New York was the best place to connect with Europeans, but “Don’t expect the Americans to like you”—that’s where they went. General Idea officially moved to New York in 1986.

At around the same time General Idea came to New York, AIDS arrived in the city. “On one hand,” Bronson said, “it was a perfect opportunity. On the other hand, it seemed to be kind of in bad taste.”

As AIDS took hold, General Idea responded. “It started as a project,” said Bronson, “and it became something that took over our lives.” They had already stolen Burroughs’s idea of the “viral image” by using the mail system to distribute what Bronson termed “mass market souvenirs.” These arrived in the form of a certificate announcing that the recipient was henceforth the proud owner of an original General Idea work—the piece of mail itself. Here was a virus that was killing their friends. The irony was not lost on them.

Robert Indiana’s famous LOVE image served as a template for one of their first responses to the health crisis. General Idea switched out the letters, replacing them with AIDS. This was akin to a pre-web meme, and like the disease, it went viral, appearing on T-shirts, posters, stamps, wallpaper, and banners, and as advertisements on public transit. The burgeoning pandemic became their muse, as did the hedonism and consumerism of the 1980s.

Adam Welch, the curator the National Gallery of Canada’s General Idea exhibition, was born after the group began making this work. He learned of them as a young, gay man in Toronto, and noted their output retains every bit of the impact it would have had in its day. “To see them address the issue [of AIDS] so boldly really made an impression on me,” he said.

After meeting with Bronson, Welch proposed the show to the National Gallery, which had been the first institution to buy work from General Idea, but had never organized a retrospective. Welch believes homophobia played a role in the gallery’s failure to recognize the brilliance of what General Idea had achieved. “Historically,” he said, “we’ve been a more conservative museum,” acknowledging that times are changing.

General Idea, Homeless Sign for Trump Tower, 1989.

Welch observed that the group was thinking about mutation before HIV, and long before Covid. It’s as if the work predicted our obsession with repurposing and disseminating imagery. Welch observed that Bronson is a huge fan of social media, which seems a natural path in light of the art practice. “Can you imagine General Idea on TikTok?” Welch asked.

Partz and Zontal did not live to see how their practice would predict life in the 21st century. Both died of AIDS-related illnesses in 1994, though they kept working until the end. “They knew their time was limited,” said Welch, “and they wanted to secure a legacy.”

The work from that era references their experiences as their health declined. Pharma©opia (1992) is an installation of AZT capsules (the drug that was developed to treat AIDS). Magic Bullet, fabricated in the same year, features pill-shaped helium-filled Mylar balloons—the reference to Andy Warhol’s Silver Clouds and similarities to Jeff Koons’s shiny dogs are unmistakable—which float until the helium depletes and they fall to the ground. As stated by Welch in the exhibition catalogue, “the balloons transmute from a gallery installation into a multiple, an act of dissemination and remembrance.”

Looking back to the group’s beginnings, Bronson recalled, “We never did anything unless all three of us agreed, which means there are a lot of things we never did.” Despite this tenet, the current exhibition shows how prolific they were. They initially predicted they would keep working together until 1984, then disband. “But by then it was a bad habit,” said Bronson. The year 1984 came and went, and General Idea kept stealing, resulting in a rich collection of masterful work.

“Steven and Michelle will guide the Gallery’s work to deepen its relationship with Indigenous communities and Nations, locally, nationally, and internationally, and lead the work of decolonization and reconciliation through all the Gallery does,” museum director and CEO Sasha Suda said in a statement.

Loft (Kanien’kehá: ka, commonly known as Mohawk) most recently served as director of strategic initiatives for Indigenous Arts and Culture and director of Creating, Knowing and Sharing: The Arts and Cultures of First Nations, Inuit and Métis Peoples, a program run by the Canada Council for the Arts. A curator, writer, and mixed media artist, he co-edited the books Transference, Technology, Tradition: Aboriginal Media and New Media Art (Banff Centre Press, 2005) and Coded Territories: Indigenous Pathways in New Media (University of Calgary Press, 2014), and has been a Curator-in-Residence, Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Canada.

LaVallee (Ojibway) is currently the director of the Indigenous Art Centre at Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, the country’s oldest and only federal heritage collection devoted to Indigenous art. Previously, she was a curator at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina, Saskatchewan, where she curated “Moving Forward, Never Forgetting” (2015). That show engaged “the personal, intergenerational, and intercultural effects of the aggressive assimilation of Indigenous peoples in Canada,” including the traumatic legacy of residential schools, out-of-culture-adoption, and the loss of ancestral land rights.

“My career is dedicated to championing Indigenous art and artists within institutions,” LaVallee said in a statement, adding, “I am invested in change, and work to challenge historical relationships with art and history museums towards respect, trust, reciprocity and accountability towards a new way of engaging with people, space, and the land.

Canada’s Indigenous artists and curators have been at the forefront of efforts to reckon with colonial legacies in museums. For example, Wanda Nanibush, a curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario, has helped the museum significantly bulk up its Indigenous art holdings. In a move to recognize First Nations people as the original occupiers of Canada, the gallery’s J.S. McLean Center for Indigenous and Canadian Art added translations of each wall text into the language into Anishinaabe, one of the oldest North American languages. Anishinaabe is also used as a collective term for related groups, including the Ojibwe and the Algonquin.

In 2008, the Canadian government commissioned a report on the long-term effects of the state-sponsored residential school system, which isolated more than 150,000 Indigenous children from their families and forcibly enrolled them in an attempt to make them assimilate. The schools were established in the 1880s, with the last one closed in late 1990s. The commission report that was issued in 2015 found that the system amounted to “cultural genocide.”

The Headlines

THE PUBLIC SQUARE. A statue of segregationist John C. Calhoun that was taken down by the city council in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2020, is without a permanent home, the Associated Press reports. The Charleston Museum does not want it, though the State Museum in Columbia is in talks to store it. LAXART  in Los Angeles has requested to borrow it for its forthcoming show of monuments to Confederate and segregationists, but a lawsuit has been filed to block that, and another is calling for it to be returned to its pedestal. Meanwhile, scholars are criticizing a barely clothed statue of a contested Muscogee figure, Chief Tomochichi, which is slated to go on view in an Atlanta park alongside civil-rights leaders like John Lewis, saying it “presents an offensive and historically inaccurate conception of Native Americans,” the AP also reports.

ARTISTS’ ACTIVITIES. The master of intricate web sculptures, Tomás Saraceno, is opening a show at the Shed in New York, and was profiled by Arthur Lubow in T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Mickalene Thomas, virtuoso portraitist in multiple mediums, discussed her just-published Phaidon monograph—”a labor of love”—with Tiana Reid in WSJ. Magazine . Street art kingpin Shepard Fairey has designed a watch for Hublot, a brand “dedicated to innovation,” he informed Nadja Sayej in Penta. And last but not least, Oscar-winning actor Adrien Brody, who painted in his youth, has returned to the art form of late, and created a piece while being interviewed by the New York Times. “This is the problem, you just can’t stop,” he said after an hour of working.

The Digest

A number of Ottawa cultural institutions, including the National Gallery of Canada, that shuttered in early January amid a coronavirus spike are staying closed as the contentious protests against coronavirus rules continue in the Canadian capital. [The Globe and Mail]

Mexican president President Andrés Manuel López Obrador slammed auction houses in France for selling pre-Hispanic artifacts that he says should be returned to the country. The houses have maintained that they offer material in line with existing law. [Associated Press]

Art collector and philanthropist Jerome “Jerry” Chazen, whose last name adorns the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s art museum, has died at 94. The onetime chief of the Liz Claiborne clothing company and his wife, Simona Chazen, were on the museum’s advisory board for two decades. [WWD]

Nannette Maciejunes, who has led the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio since 2003, said that she will retire at the end of the year. [The Columbus Dispatch]

Author, curator, and activist Kimberly Drew has joined the Pace Gallery as an associate director. “I looked into Pace because, though it is a commercial gallery space, there’s a dynamism and agility there,” Drew told Alex Greenberger. “As an outsider looking in, I was like, ‘This looks like an appetizing place to pivot.’ ” [ARTnews]

Researchers are on the hunt for a long-missing 12-foot-wide Paolo Veronese painting, and have evidence that it was last recorded in 1904 in the collection of the Arbuthnot Museum in Peterhead, Scotland. An area council said, “We are doing our bit, and ask anyone with information or memories of this piece to get in touch.” [BBC News]

The Kicker

THE POPE OF TRASH. In what has to be one of the most unusual lots ever to grace a charity auction, artist and filmmaker John Waters is hosting a dinner for ten at the town dump in Provincetown, Massachusetts, to raise money for the Provincetown Film Society. “I like the idea of elegance in a very low place and I think ‘the dump’ just has a good ring to it,” Waters told the Cape Cod Times . He noted that “a dump is a place where all people meet, to find things and throw away things they’re embarrassed by.” With more than five days of bidding left, the price for two tickets stands at $1,375, a bargain for what sounds like an unforgettable experience. [Cape Cod Times]

Nara Roesler Now Represents Elian Almeida
Nara Roesler, which maintains gallery spaces in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and New York, now represents Brazilian artist Elian Almeida. His work addresses decolonialism, in particular the social performativity of the Black body. Almeida’s practice spans photography, video, and installation, but is primarily grounded in painting. Historical images and pop culture references populate his paintings, drawing a line from the past to contemporary Black Brazilian culture. Almeida’s first solo exhibition with the gallery will open on September 1 at its space in Rio de Janeiro.

Stavros Niarchos Foundation Gifts $1 M. to the Met for Live Programming
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has received an endowment of $1 million from the Athens-based Stavros Niarchos Foundation to support its Department of Live Arts, which launched in 2013. That department presents various live productions ranging from opera and dance to music that are inspired by works in the museum’s permanent collection. In a statement, Andreas Dracopoulos, Niarchos Foundation co-president, said, “MetLiveArts answers the question ‘Who are museums for?’ with a resounding ‘Everyone!’ It reminds us that museums, at their best, are vibrant civic spaces full of activity and life.”

Thursday, August 12

Performa Appoints Rashid Johnson as Board Chair
Performa, the New York–based performance art nonprofit known for its biennial, has announced that artist Rashid Johnson will be the next chair of the board of directors. Todd Bishop, former deputy director of external affairs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, has also been named as the board’s treasurer. Johnson and Bishop will assume their new roles prior to the Performa 2021 Biennial, which is slated to take place this October across New York City. Johnson has served on Performa’s board since 2014 and previously collaborated with the organization during Performa 13 Biennial in 2013, where he debuted his first live performance.

Left: Rashid Johnson. Photo by Chris Sorensen. Right: Todd Bishop.

The Naked Room to Represent Ukraine at 59th Venice Biennale
The Naked Room gallery in Kyiv will represent Ukraine at the 2022 Venice Biennale, which is scheduled to run from April 23 through November 27. For the exhibition, artist Pavlo Makov will present Fountain of Exhaustion, a series of wall mounted copper funnels that reference the scarcity of functional water fountains in his native Kharkiv in the 1990s. The exposition will be accompanied by archival materials detailing the history of the installation. The work was chosen by the curatorial group comprising Lizaveta Herman, Maria Lanko, and Borys Filonenko.

Moderna Museet Names New Curator of International Contemporary Art
The Moderna Museet in Sweden has appointed Hendrik Folkerts as curator of international contemporary art, a newly created position. Folkert, who is currently a curator of modern and contemporary art at the Art Institute of Chicago, will begin at the museum in October. He has previously worked for the Stedelijk Museum and the De Appel arts center in Amsterdam and was on the curatorial team of Documenta 14 in Kassel, Germany, and Athens. Gitte Ørskou, the Modern Museet’s director, said in a statement, “Our museum has a long-standing history of hosting international artists for groundbreaking exhibitions, performances, and other presentations. … In his role, Folkerts will be important in bringing this legacy into the future.”

Wednesday, August 11

L.A.’s Nicodim Gallery Expands to New York
Los Angeles–based Nicodim Gallery will open a New York location in October at 15 Green Street in the city’s SoHo neighborhood. The inaugural exhibition will be dedicated to the work of emerging artist Simphiwe Ndzube, who is based in L.A. and Cape Town, South Africa. He had a solo show at Nicodim’s L.A. space earlier this year and is currently the subject of a survey at the Denver Art Museum. In a statement, gallery owner Mihai Nicodim said, “This new space will give us an opportunity showcase [our artists’] work and feed into the conversation happening alongside all the other amazing galleries in the neighborhood.”

Amon Carter Museum Receives Over 200 Photographs and Works on Paper
The Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, has received a gift of more than 240 photographs and works on paper as a bequest from the estate of local entrepreneur, and collector Finis Welch, who died last year. The gift includes prints by Alfred Stieglitz, William Eggleston, Dorothea Lange, and Robert Motherwell. Other highlights are works on paper by Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, Lewis Rubenstein, and Rufino Tamayo. Around 50 works from the gift will go on view at the Carter in the exhibition “Beauty and Life: The Finis Welch Collection,” opening next February.

Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel Adds New Directors
Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel gallery in São Paulo has announced the addition of four directors. Ana Paula Paclanotto and Luiza Calmon, former members of the gallery team will now be as sales directors. Paul Jenkins, previously a director of Gagosian gallery in New York and Rio de Janeiro, will be director of international sales, and Marilisa Cunha Cardoso is now director of operations.

Tuesday, August 10

New York’s ICP Names New Executive Director
The International Center of Photography in New York has appointed David E. Little as its new executive director, beginning next month. Little, who will succeed Mark Lubell, had been the director and chief curator of the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College for the past six years. He has  previously held positions at the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. In a statement, Little said, “Much as when ICP was founded almost 50 years ago, we continue to see first-hand how powerful socially and politically minded images can change the world.”

The National Gallery of Canada.

Monday, August 9

National Gallery of Canada Receives Support For Major Initiatives  
The National Gallery of Canada has received funding from the Royal Bank of Canada to support three major initiatives. The first is “Re-Creation,” which will commission emerging and established Indigenous artists to create works inspired by traditional media, techniques, and practices; the first two artists to receive commissions as part of the program are Chief 7idansuu James Hart of the Stastas Eagle Clan and Lisa Hageman Yahjujanaas of the Raven moiety. The RBC Emerging Artists Acquisition Fund will support the acquisition of up to four works from diverse Canadian emerging artists over the next three years. The final program will sponsor of Vancouver-based artist Stan Douglas at the 2022 edition of the Venice Biennale. The initiatives have received a combined total of $900,000, ensuring their continuation through 2024. “The efforts of the National Gallery of Canada are invaluable, providing much-needed opportunities for diverse and specifically Indigenous emerging artists to be recognized and exposed to new audiences,” Mark Beckles, Royal Bank of Canada vice president, said in a statement.

Hong Kong Arts Development Council Members Resign
Three elected members of the Hong Kong Arts Development Council—Chris Chan, Adrian Chow, and Indy Lee—resigned from their positions last week after being labeled “troublemakers” by Chinese state-run newspapers, the Hong Kong Free Press reports. The government-funded council, which is responsible for allocating grants to various arts organizations and programs, was recently accused of giving money to arts groups that are seen as supportive of pro-democracy protesters, which could be seen as a violation of the city’s recent national security law. The three artists were elected to the council in 2016 by an overwhelming majority.

Candice Hopkins photographed in Toronto, April 2019.

ANYA CHIBIS

The independent curator Candice Hopkins recently moved back to Canada, where she was born, from New Mexico, her base for the past several years. For someone who has worked for over two decades to bring artwork by contemporary indigenous artists into the foreground of the mainstream art world, it could not have been better timing. “I feel like in Canada there is, at the moment, this space of reckoning,” she said.

In 2008 the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada was established to document the history of the government-funded Canadian Indian residential school system, which between 1879 and 1996 removed some 150,000 Native Canadian children from their families and communities and, in the name of assimilation, placed them in often abusive boarding schools. This practice and its devastating effects are part of Hopkins’s own family history. She was born in the Yukon, in northwestern Canada, and is a citizen of the Carcross/Tagish First Nation. Her grandmother, who died last year, was one of those sent to a residential school and it wasn’t until late in life, after she had received reparations as part of the Commission, that she began telling stories of that past.

Hopkins believes that it was trauma that silenced her grandmother for so long, and there is no doubt that Canada’s program of forced assimilation created, as Hopkins wrote in 2017, “a breakdown so profound that the horrors of the past not only go unspoken but remain incomprehensible as well, even when their effects are acutely felt in the present.” Part of the work of the Commission—whose final report, made in 2015, described the system as “cultural genocide”—was to collect the stories of survivors like Hopkins’s grandmother, many of whom were sharing them for the first time. Their forced assimilation served its purpose, stifling traditional knowledge that would otherwise have been passed down over generations.

On a chilly Sunday morning this past March inside the Met Breuer, a drawing of an angel blowing into a wind instrument by Siah Armajani prompted a memory for Hopkins, in New York for a panel. “Where we’re from, the land is considered a mnemonic device,” she told me. “There were certain markers in the land that when you got to those markers, you were meant to sing, and embedded in the song is all the knowledge you need to know about that part of the landscape.” Orally transmitted folklore such as this has slowly become, if not lost, increasingly less accessible.

[See the Table of Contents for the Summer 2019 edition of ARTnews: “Reshaping the American Museum.”]

The question that has long been central to Hopkins’s curatorial process is, “How can we open up a space again to other voices?” As more and more arts institutions race to present the work of contemporary indigenous artists, this question has become more urgent than ever. For Hopkins, it’s important to understand that artists can speak for themselves. “In art we have these very bad tendencies to represent the ‘other,’ ” she said. “We can still have more complicated discussions about identity, but, in order to have them, we have to confront that. It’s more of a deeper question of who’s representing whom and who’s speaking for whom.”

Hopkins sees curating itself as a “space of listening,” she said. As she wrote in an essay for last year’s SITElines, a biennial in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for which she was co-curator, art “allows us to hear in moments of silence, to open our ears rather than to close them.” It’s a belief that has shaped the trajectory of her career.

In 2016, as part of the run-up to 2017’s Documenta 14 in Kassel, Germany, and Athens, Greece, Hopkins co-organized the School of Listening, a summer intensive program in Kassel for students from both cities. Over the course of ten days, contributors to the quinquennial exhibition discussed what part listening played in their respective fields.

“Within art, we put so much emphasis on what we see, but so much of what we see isn’t what we experience,” Hopkins said. The School of Listening was an attempt “to create a radical disjuncture between all of the capital put on what we can see and instead think about what we can or cannot hear.”

Candice Hopkins in a former car dealership near the Toronto waterfront that will be one of the main venues for the city’s new biennial opening in September.

ANYA CHIBIS

This coming September, as senior curator of the first Toronto Biennial of Art, Hopkins will have her biggest opportunity yet to expand on the topic of listening—and how that might change how we relate to the earth.

Toronto lies along the northwestern edge of Lake Ontario, and the city’s geography serves as the starting point for the Biennial. For years, access to the water has been impeded by such man-made interventions as the Gardiner Expressway, which runs for some seven miles along the shoreline. Add to that the breweries and canneries that have historically dumped waste into the nearby Don River and you get, as Hopkins is fond of saying, “a city with its back to the water.”

In what is often called the most diverse city in the world, the Toronto Biennial will take up residence along the waterfront and will embed a specific local context—the history of the area’s indigenous peoples, as well as that of its settlers and immigrants—within the larger discourse of the contemporary art world. The aim of the Toronto Biennial, said deputy director and director of programs Ilana Shamoon, is to “engage in global conversations that we Canadians are leading in many ways—around truth and reconciliation, around inclusion more broadly.”

In tandem with her research into how the Biennial could take shape, Shamoon commissioned performance artist Ange Loft (Kahnawake Mohawk) to create the Toronto Indigenous Context Brief, a document that charts 1,000 years activity of indigenous communities along the waterfront. When Hopkins and fellow Biennial curator Tairone Bastien approached artists about participating, they gave them Loft’s Brief, and listened to the artists’ reactions.

“Candice listens, and most importantly does not categorize and dissect one’s practice which is in constant movement as it responds to life. Western curators have been forever trained in the system of categories, so it is far more difficult for them to listen without putting the artist in a box,” artist Maria Thereza Alves said from Toronto Island, where she is conducting research as part of her participation in the Biennial.

Hopkins was born in Whitehorse, the capital of and only city in the Yukon. Almost 300 miles southeast of the Alaska border, Whitehorse is the top corner of a triangle formed with Carcross (a portmanteau of Caribou Crossing) and Teslin, two villages where several of Hopkins’s relatives still live. The gold rush brought 100,000 gold miners to the remote Klondike region in the Yukon in the late 1890s, and Hopkins can trace her family’s history to that era—when, as she describes in an essay in the Documenta 14 Reader, “capitalist greed and desire transformed everything and everyone in its path.”

During her childhood, Hopkins’s father, a truck driver in the logging industry, moved the family south, to a remote area in northern British Columbia called Fort St. John along the Alaska Highway. Hopkins returned there after college in Calgary, where she studied art, and started working at the local Friendship Centre, a cultural space for urban indigenous people.

Brian Jungen, Prototype for a New Understanding #2, 1998, which appeared in “Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now,” at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

© BRIAN JUNGEN/TREVOR MILLS, VANCOUVER ART GALLERY

One day, the Friendship Centre received a fax about internships in the South Pacific for indigenous youth. Hopkins applied for one in Fiji “because that sounded like the best place in the world if you’re a kid in northern British Columbia and you’ve never even been to the ocean.” Her internship focused on recovering local indigenous knowledge of traditional medicine that had been outlawed, though kept alive in the community, under British colonial rule. She wondered afterward how she might apply that process of knowledge reclamation to the art world—not through a historic, anthropological lens, but with contemporary indigenous artists.

From Fiji, she applied to the master’s program at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, in Upstate New York. Back in Fort St. John and before heading to graduate school, she worked for the Treaty 8 Tribal Association. She curated a small exhibition there that presented a range of local indigenous art forms. Shown along with historical documents from the association’s archives and musical performances were ceremonial masks made from Nike Air Jordans by Brian Jungen, an artist of Swiss and Dane-Zaa ancestry, and a light box that Hopkins made herself.

Among her mentors at CCS Bard in the early 2000s were luminaries like Marcia Tucker and David Levi Strauss. “Until I went to Bard, I didn’t really understand how my experiences lent themselves to curatorial practice,” she said.

In 2009, after a four-year stint as director and curator of exhibitions at the artist-founded Western Front in Vancouver, Hopkins was offered a curatorial residency focusing on indigenous art at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. She also began collaborating with Steve Loft, Lee-Ann Martin, and Jenny Western, all curators of indigenous descent, on the multi-venue “Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years,” organized to celebrate Winnipeg, which has Canada’s largest indigenous population, as the Cultural Capital of Canada for 2010.

“Close Encounters” looked to change the way work by indigenous artists is presented and discussed. Rather than “freezing us in the past,” as the curators wrote in the introduction to the exhibition catalogue, the show presented work by indigenous artists from around the world who draw from a wide range of sources, methods, and materials—both traditional and nontraditional—to make art that looks to the future. Among those included were Alves, Jungen, Rebecca Belmore, Jeffrey Gibson, Faye HeavyShield, James Luna, Tracey Moffatt, Kent Monkman, Postcommodity, and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun.

With Greg Hill and Christine Lalonde, Hopkins curated the 2013 exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, “Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art,” which brought together work by more than 80 international indigenous artists from the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as Japan, Taiwan, India, and Finland. When the show opened, the museum’s then director, Marc Mayer, acknowledged that the institution sits on unceded Algonquin land, a practice that has now become common in Canada post–Truth and Reconciliation.

Rebecca Belmore, The Blanket (still), 2011, was included in “Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years,” Winnipeg.

COURTESY THE ARTIST

For Jackson Polys (Tlingit), a member of the artist collective the New Red Order, “Sakahàn” was a watershed for indigenous art. “The danger was that [the show] would essentialize the indigenous and then reify assumptions that indigenous art is counter to contemporary art,” said Polys, whose group—a self-described “public secret society” that acknowledges indigenous histories while calling into question definitions of indigeneity—will participate in the Toronto Biennial. Instead, the “Sakahàn” show was a “huge push to counter the false separation between the indigenous and the contemporary. It expanded the possibilities of what indigenous could be and provoked the question: What constitutes indigenous art? For me, this is an open question.”

Polys wasn’t the only one impressed by “Sakahàn.” Irene Hofmann, director of SITE Santa Fe, followed it from afar, and in 2012 invited Hopkins to be part of a closed-door symposium to explore how SITE’s well-regarded international biennial could be reframed. The result was the launch, in 2014, of SITElines, which looked to explore arts from throughout the Americas, particularly the northern and southern reaches.

Hofmann then invited Hopkins, who had recently moved to New Mexico, to serve on the SITElines curatorial team. Hopkins, who was instrumental in ensuring that contemporary Native artists were core to the project, proudly said that SITElines has “managed to show more brown and indigenous artists than any other biennial in the U.S.”

Meanwhile, Hopkins was still working in Canada. What got Shamoon interested in her work was Hopkins’s involvement with Indigenous Art Park in Edmonton, Alberta. In 2015, 16 indigenous artists were shortlisted to engage in dialogue there with local Native elders in order to create proposals for work in a public park, which would permanently exhibit pieces by Canadian indigenous artists. The six commissioned works thus became a mixture of the artists’ and the community’s vision. Jerry Whitehead (Cree) created mosaic shells for turtles that reference “Turtle Bay,” the indigenous name for the continent of North America. “When you think of the land in that way, as a living being, as an organism, as a body,” Hopkins said at the time, “it makes you relate to the land differently. You respect it differently. You might even stand or step on it differently.”

The following year, Adam Szymczyk, curator of the 14th edition of Documenta, brought Hopkins on board as a curatorial adviser for the exhibition. A few months later she became part of the core curatorial team and relocated to Europe to work on the portion of the show in Athens. “I instinctively knew this is someone I wanted to work with,” Szymczyk said. He was particularly interested in bringing curators “who could speak on their own and from their experience. I wouldn’t want to be someone who represents other people.”

Szymczyk added that how indigenous artists are included in international exhibitions “is a key question that should be addressed” so as to avoid “the objectification of the work and the authors of the work.”

Twenty-two masks from Beau Dick’s ”Atlakim” series, 1990–2012, installation view, at EMST—National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, Documenta 14.

MATHIAS VÖLZKE

Art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson said that a strength of the Documenta exhibition came from Hopkins’s inclusion of multiple indigenous artists, including the late Beau Dick (Dzawada’enux) and Rebecca Belmore (Anishinaabe), as well as many Sámi artists from the arctic reaches of Finland. “This is where some of the most relevant and urgent art-making is happening,” Bryan-Wilson said, noting that Hopkins’s influence on the exhibition was readily apparent.

For their contributions to Documenta, both Dick and Belmore started with Athens’s role as the birthplace of democracy—and, for many, Western civilization—and how to relate it to the specific indigenous contexts from which they were working, particularly during the height of a migrant crisis in Europe. Belmore produced a sculpture in the form of a refugee tent in marble that faced the ruins of the Acropolis.

Dick, who died days before Documenta opened, had planned to travel to Athens to speak with people who had fled their homeland. He also created a series of ceremonial Atlakim masks that were to be included in the exhibition temporarily until they would be shipped back to Canada and burned as part of a potlach ceremony in Alert Bay in British Columbia. The stands were to remain empty for the duration of Documenta to show that the masks had a life other than as objects for display and to highlight the ways in which these belongings—and indigeneity at large—are commodified. The artist’s death left these conversations and ceremonies unfinished.

“[Hopkins] is someone who is thinking so incisively and creatively about how the category of art needs to be expanded,” Bryan-Wilson, the art historian, said. “She’s been one of the most thoughtful and interesting voices, pushing the discussion forward.” Part of the discussion, as Bryan-Wilson sees it, relates to “how an art institution should be responsible to different narratives and how all these narratives are needed.”

For the most recent edition of SITElines in 2018, titled “Casa tomada,” Hopkins invited José Luis Blondet and Ruba Katrib to be co-curators. She also commissioned Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne/Arapaho) to create a suite of 24 monoprints and 24 ghost prints; she had been working with him on another project, and saw potential in a new printmaking technique he was developing.

“Candice saw the vision of what it would look like,” Heap of Birds said of the project, which looks to reframe gun violence and mass shootings as a historical—not simply a contemporary—phenomenon. “Candice saw this huge future and then got it supported. Her seeing that and making that happen blew open this whole part of my life.”

He paused, and added, “The end game, you hope, is that First Nations women will look at her and say, ‘I want to do that.’ ”

Film still from Isuma’s One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk, 2019, which debuted in the Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

LEVI UTTAK/ISUMA DISTRIBUTION INTERNATIONAL

Hopkins is now one of the world’s busiest and most closely followed curators. She recently worked with Mindy N. Besaw and Manuela Well-Off-Man on the traveling exhibition “Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now,” which debuted at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, last fall. That exhibition sought to demonstrate how artistic practices of contemporary Native artists have developed since the middle of the 20th century. Another ongoing traveling show, “Soundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts” (co-curated with Dylan Robinson), looks at the ways in which sound might be a tool—or a call—for decolonization.

In addition to the Toronto Biennial, she is also on the curatorial team for Canada’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale this summer, which features the Arctic-based collective Isuma, the first Inuit artists to represent Canada. Much of their video work was created and screened with an Inuit audience in mind, and looks at forced displacement of the Inuit people in the past and the impact of mining projects on their communities today. Isuma’s early films, all in the Inuktitut language, are “about what self-representation means,” Hopkins said.

Hopkins has also begun collaborating with the composer and artist Raven Chacon (Navajo/Diné), who is her husband. Their performative lectures incorporate timed silences that, Chacon said, build on their conversations about the times when indigenous people haven’t been allowed to have a voice. Chacon pointed to John Cage’s famous statement, “I have nothing to say, and I am saying it.”

“He chose to use silence as a device to speak,” Chacon said, “[but there are] times where indigenous people don’t have that privilege. They are just silenced.”

As indigenous artists increasingly speak for themselves, Hopkins said, “We actually get the art history that we’re ready for. What is clear is that ‘art’ is too limiting a category. That becomes a curatorial challenge. How do you do something different?”

A version of this story originally appeared in the Summer 2019 issue of ARTnews on page 74 under the title “The Sound of Listening.”